Come Full Circle
by NemesisNecrosis
Summary: It was likely that, had he spent the early years of his newest incarnation creating happy memories with a new family, Asura would never have remembered his past incarnations. As it was, however... (In the back of his mind, Uchiha Sasuke always knew something was - off.)


"Perhaps, if things had gone differently, Asura would have called himself Naruto. As it was, for the first few years of his life, the only names he was called were not any of the names he felt a connection to. Fox brat, Demon, Kyuubi - truly, he felt no animosity towards his less-human siblings, but considering that he was none of these things (although you could maybe make a case for calling him a fox brat, all things considered), and considering the fact that he never once heard the name Naruto between birth and age four, he figured he could be forgiven for using the name he had carried for a whole life once before.

Again, he had no way of knowing, but it was possible that if Asura had spent his childhood creating memories of love and happiness with this incarnation's family, he might not have kept his memories of his past lives. This was not the case, however, and so instead he had inherited the memories and name of the first of the Senju line - along with glimpses of the lives of every person who had inherited his will between then and now.

 _(It's Hashirama. I can't tell you my last name, for obvious reasons.)_

When he looked at what his father's teachings had come to, Asura couldn't help but think that in the end, perhaps Indra had won. Ninshū had become Ninjutsu, the legacy of the Sage of Six Paths turned from the pursuit of peace to the cultivation of power. Rare were the lives in which Asura's reincarnations had lived peacefully, and rarer still were those in which they had lived without conflict between his descendants and Indra's.

Also, philosophies aside, there was no denying the fact that, where the Uchiha clan boasted numbers exceeding three hundred, the Uzumaki and Senju had dwindled down, as far as he knew, to two - Senju Tsunade and himself.

 _And yet,_ Asura thought, gazing out over the bloody scene before him, _It seems, in the end, that we must be made equals._

Deeper inside the decimated Uchiha Compound, Asura could feel the other two chakra signals in the area meet. Both filled with numb grief, but where one screamed disbelief and confusion, the other was steeled with determination. Soon after their meeting, the first fell unconscious, and the second fled.

(In the back of his mind, Uchiha Sasuke always knew something was - off.

It was in the way his father's face sometimes looked wrong, the way he sometimes watched his mother as though she might disappear. It was the way he turned to the right to comment to - someone. Someone who wasn't there. Someone who should have been there, who had been there as long as he remembered, until he wasn't.

( _Otouto_ , Itachi called him, and it was wrong, he was no one's little brother, _he_ was the oldest son, it was his right-)

He dreamed, some nights, of a man with brown hair and dark eyes, who stood beside him. He dreamed of an old man, who looked between him and the other, and chose the younger son over the elder. He dreamed of the man, his brother, before a small army all arrayed against him.

(Sometimes he looked at his father and felt the most blinding, breathtaking hatred, his thoughts a chorus of _why, father, was I not powerful enough?)_

And some nights he dreamed of a shadow, which stood behind him and whispered dark messages of _right_ and _revenge_ in his ear. After the massacre, those dreams would come more and more often.

It felt familiar to hate his brother, for all that everything else about their relationship was strange, opposite of all it seemed it should be. It was odd to be the younger, less talented son, ever compared to the genius first born.

He was the Last Uchiha, the last loyal member of a clan which had been responsible, along with the Senju, for the very era they lived in. In the back of his mind, however, he remembered being the first.

In early hours of the morning, he sometimes remembered two boys beside a river, a shared dream, a desperate desire that no one else they loved would die. There was a part of him that bitterly laughed at the irony that the dream they hoped would lead to peace and safety had instead lead to the utter destruction of both their clans.)


End file.
